MKM's analyst Daniel Berenbaum has been consistently negative on SanDisk for at least three years, during which time earnings soared and the share price more than doubled, despite his view that the stock price would sink.

His latest analysis is factually incorrect and not credible. If you look at NAND flash bit growth per unit and look at the main applications – smartphones and tablets – you will see a tremendous surge in demand, both in bits per unit and total units sold. As to the notion that supply is outstripping demand, that is also questionable because, historically speaking, NAND demand is highly elastic: When the price goes down, demand increases. Berenbaum has been consistently wrong over the years in asserting that a drop in price per bit means lower profit margins. It may mean that for the also rans, but not for the technology leader, which in this case is SanDisk, by a wide margin.

As the financial reports from SanDisk reveal, quarter after quarter, and year after year, the drop in price for the NAND units made and sold by SanDisk has been less than the drop in cost, even adjusted for the gain in the value of the Japanese yen last year. Thus, SanDisk's product margins have remained very healthy, augmented by patent royalties from other producers. None of this sways Berenbaum's analyses, which may have a different agenda. . .

One area where Berenbaum may be correct, however, is that iPad customers prefer buying the models with less NAND flash, but that is probably due to Apple pricing its higher memory models in a manner that lets Apple make huge profits on its NAND purchases alone. Pay $100 more for 32GB additional memory? Doesn't look like a bargain to me.

As to the impact on QCOM, the Berenbaum analysis also may be misleading. Because smartphones and tablets are clearly on the ascent, and their growth rate outstrips overall demand in their respective markets, Berenbaum is underestimating the growth in the area directly addressed by QCOM products, as well as royalties on QCOM IP. Oh well, that's just par for Barenbaum's course.

Most of the buzz around the Chinese telecom stocks concentrates on handicapping the Apple ( AAPL , quote ) factor: who has the real iPhone or the iPad, who wants these hot products, how well they're selling. But there's a hidden trade riding all these devices -- whether they're bootlegs or not.

Qualcomm ( QCOM , quote ) makes the chips that put phones and tablet computers on the CDMA wireless networking standard. It doesn't matter who builds the device, if it works on a CDMA network, Qualcomm gets a cut of maybe $6 out of a $200 retail price.

Traders are familiar with how this proposition works in the U.S. phone market, but the analysts at Trefis recently had the idea of taking the story to China.

They point out that every Lumia phone from Nokia and every iPad or iPhone pumping out of Apple incorporates QCOM chips. And 20% of the world's smartphones go to China as that country's 1 billion mobile users start dumping their voice-only handsets and getting online.

Manufacturer by manufacturer, QCOM wins where Apple wins, so watch Apple's sales reports and build the numbers into your models of how well the notoriously analyst-shy chip maker is doing in China

But QCOM also wins when Nokia sells one of its Windows-enabled Lumia phones. And with Samsung on board -- and local Android favorites ZTCOY and Huawei signing massive supply contracts -- QCOM has that operating system covered as well.

Just between those five vendors, QCOM has a claim on maybe 75% of the Chinese smartphone market.

Likewise, in terms of the individual Chinese carriers, the potential is vast and only slightly less universal.

China Unicom ( CHU , quote ), on the other hand, dumped its CDMA network entirely, so whenever CHU signs a new account, QCOM may or may not make money -- it depends entirely on the phone maker's choice of chips.

And China Mobile ( CHL , quote ), the biggest of the "big three" and the most extensive wireless network on earth, is more controversial. While QCOM argues that its patents drive the China Mobile 3G standard, the claims have yet to be really tested.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

I don't care how many models Samsung makes. I have never had a worse phone than the Samsung Omnia. It was a nightmere and I would never buy another Samsung phone. I loved my KYOCERA, the Palm was a pain but the IPhone is the ultimate in being user friendly and always working. And ditto for the IPad. My next computer will be Apple.

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Art, it's funny how you can write that, such a short time after 32GB of memory was unimaginable: <Pay $100 more for 32GB additional memory? Doesn't look like a bargain to me. > I paid big heaps for 40 megabytes only 23 years ago. How long will it be before terabytes cost nearly nothing?

They are already free in that I ask Google something, and it racks It's brains for a second or two, searching vast tracts of memory which must be in googol quantities these days, then gives not just the right answer, but associative-thinking answers too. kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte